Mixtec Revival: Mexican Indigenous Language on the Rise (fwd)

[Phil CashCash]

Mixtec Revival: Mexican Indigenous Language on the Rise

News Feature,  Eduardo Stanley,
Pacific News Service, Sep 16, 2003
http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=bf1b09953e17d2157b3d391e5d4a34af

  Editor's Note: For Mixtecs, indigenous people from the mountains of
southern Mexico, neither the Spanish conquest of Mexico nor the
migration of hundreds of thousands of their people to the United States
has destroyed their "language of rain."

 FRESNO, Calif.--Its speakers know the name of their language, one of
the oldest in the Americas, means "the language of rain."

 But far from having the evanescence of a rainstorm, the indigenous
language Mixtec is enjoying a renaissance in the 21st century.

 Spoken for at least 1,000 years in the mountainous countryside of the
present-day Mexican states of Oaxaca, Puebla and Guerrero, Mixtec
already has survived cataclysms such as the Spanish conquest and
centuries of brutal colonial administration.

 More recently, the language has faced a more beguiling force: the
phenomenon of immigration. Hundreds of thousands of Mixtecs have left
their homes in southern Mexico, journeying to the industrial centers of
northern Mexico or crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to labor in
California, especially in the agribusinesses of the Central Valley.

 Still, despite the ubiquity of Spanish and English, Mixtec is
prospering on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border.

 Partly due to a cultural revival in indigenous Mexico sparked by the
Zapatista uprising in 1994, and thanks to the grassroots persistence of
Mixtec educators and scholars, more people than ever are speaking the
language, one of many in a worldwide movement that seeks to preserve
and revive indigenous languages, from Hmong to Evank to Welsh to Maori.

 More than half a million people speak Mixtec today, According to the
Mexico-based Academy of the Mixtec Language. In 1930, less than 200,000
spoke it.

 "Many anthropologists said that urbanization was going to modernize us
and that we would no longer speak our language and turn to Spanish, but
it didn't turn out that way -- today our languages have a new life,"
says Tiburcio Pérez Castro, a member of the academy, who teaches Mixtec
in the United States.

 Not only that, but the oral lingua franca of some of the most remote
villages in southern Mexico now is being established as a written
language.

 "To keep a language alive, writing it is fundamental," says Gaspar
Rivera, a Mixtec and University of Southern California sociologist. For
Mixtecs living in the United States, the challenges of maintaining
fluency in their native tongue "are doubled, because in addition to all
the pressures of the Spanish-speaking world, we also have to face the
pressures of English," he adds.

 Rivera notes that Mixtec communities, both in the United States and in
Mexico, suffer from high rates of illiteracy. The spread of written
Mixtec, he says, could help address this educational deficiency, and
also make it easier for Mixtecs to learn Spanish and English, since
knowing how to read and write aids lessons in any language.

 Already, mainly through the Office of the Development of the Indigenous
people, Mexico is planning to fund programs that will teach Mixtec and
other indigenous languages to migrants living in the United States. The
cabinet-level office has an annual budget of $180 million.

 One epicenter of the Mixtec diaspora is California's inland
agricultural heartland. An estimated 65,000 Mixtecs live in the Central
Valley. At a Fresno community center recently, almost 50 people
attended a workshop on written Mixtec. Tiburcio Peréz Castro, the
teacher from the Mexican government-funded Academy of the Mixtec
Language, taught participants how to write out the language's basic
sounds and words using the Roman alphabet.

 "I feel that I learned a lot today," says Leonor Morales, a 33-year-old
Mixtec who lives in California and speaks only Spanish. "I want to
learn it, and this is a good opportunity."

 For Fidelina Espinoza, a 23-year-old Mixtec and the mother of two
girls, the motivations are different. "I speak Mixtec, but I don't
write it. I know that maintaining my language is very important for my
daughters and I."

 Their teacher was sent to Fresno, the largest city in the Central
Valley, by the academy, which was founded in 1997 and headquartered in
Tlaxiaco, in Oaxaca state, Mexico. The academy aims to establish the
norms of written Mixtec, lead research and disseminate Mixtec language
and culture.

 In the Fresno workshop, different variations of spoken Mixtec filled
the room. Different Mixtec dialects may use different words for the
same object, even though the Mixtecs come from villages in Mexico
separated by only a half-day's walk.

 Pérez Castro explains that a written script for Mixtec will help
inhabitants from different villages communicate with one another, since
the creation of a standardized vocabulary will smooth over linguistic
variants in the rugged countryside where the language originated.

 Rufino Domínguez, coordinator of the Fresno-based Binational Oaxacan
Indigenous Front, says he believes that regular Mixtec-language courses
eventually will replace occasional seminars taught by teachers sent
from Mexico.

 Domínguez notes the prestige of a written system may also help erase
stigma attached to native languages by centuries of discrimination
against indigenous Mexicans.

 "The practical benefits of a written language are obvious," says
Domínguez. "From public health messages to family correspondence, the
writing of our language is a historical necessity."

 PNS contributor Eduardo Stanley (nuestroforo2001 at yahoo.com) is a
freelance writer based in the San Joaquin Valley. He hosts the
bi-lingual "Nuestro Foro" weekly radio program on KFCF in Fresno,
Calif.